Well, for one thing you design a robot that can tolerate limited error and go around it.
For another, you design a robot that can "phone home" for instructions in the case of the unexpected, just like a human would.
And for the third, developing a robotic repair capability would allow us to maintain things like the JWST if we need to, things that are outside of our current human space presence. How can you possibly view that as bad?
Yes, human space exploration is good, but we know how to send missions to Hubble, we know how to do spacewalks. We don't know how to let a robot automatically do detailed repair and upgrade work. I have a lot of respect for Hubble, but at this point in its lifetime, using it as the testbed for automated robotic repair technologies is every bit as useful as the continued science it can do.
If a blackhole came near enough to us to affect us, we would be *screwed*, warning or none. We don't have interstellar flight and would be unlikely to develop it in time, and you'd need interstellar flight to avoid that sort of disaster.
No, it really isn't, for two reasons - conformal battery packs and size.
It's one thing to exchange a propane tank, but electric cars use a LOT of batteries, spread all over the vehicle. Exchanging 750 pounds of batteries isn't going to be any faster than charging them.
Further, I would assume that to minimize the location issues, sooner or later they may have to go to conformal cells, which would be even less exchangeable.
Actually, for a car, batteries have a bigger problem - charge time. Who wants to sit around for hours waiting for their car to charge?
Flywheels, OTOH, are interesting. There's a company (US Flywheel) that, last I checked, had a working 50lb flywheel, 6" radius, that spun at 60krpm. This gives an energy storage of KE = 5.2 MJ. A gallon of gas stores 120 MJ. Now, that seems like a lot - after all, you're replacing a gallon of gas weighing around 6 lbs with 1200 lbs of flywheel. However, here are some things to consider - flywheel efficiencies are typically 80-90%, with 95% not unheard of (remember, the flywheel basically provides direct energy to a highly efficient electric motor), while gas engines that approach 30% are considered very good. Thus, a gallon of gas stores 120 MJ, but you only get 40 out, while you still get around 5 MJ for your 50 lb flywheel. Add to this the support structure needed for a gas-based car - engine, transmission, gas tank, etc, and you might find that flywheels could compete. The primary problem right now is that the kind of flywheel I'm talking of is a composite-fiber custom job that ain't cheap; mass production might help bring it down to the point where it could be used in cars.
And the nice thing about flywheels is that you can spin them up a lot faster than you can charge a battery. 3 hours charging is one thing, but I suspect a 10-20 minute charge for 300 miles of driving wouldn't bother anyone.
15 would be a little bit much for me, but in a lot of big cities it really can be faster to cycle if its less than 10 miles. I'm not a speedy cyclist and can usually do about 10 mph on city streets (note: I stop at stop signs and follow rules of the road, the 10 mph is ground covered, not cycle speed). During rush hour, 10 miles can easily be an hour long drive.
Work for me is 32 miles away; cycling the whole thing isn't an option, but I do try to do part of my trip by cycle (the rest is by train and bus; it takes about 30-50 minutes longer, but I don't have to drive).
I have studied the origin of religious thought, and its application to morality, as present in the Judaeo-Christian faiths.
Give me one piece of fact supporting religion. One piece of what the scientific method would consider verifiable evidence for it.
The things in science that I take on faith are taken, not on faith in the actual discovery, but on faith in the scientists and methods used to determine and verify the discovery. My faith is that, if I looked at their data, I would see the same thing.
There are thoughtful Christians, but rarely are they truly thoughtful about their faith. Unfortunately, there's something about religion that blinds even the most intelligent, rational person.
That's interesting-looking; I'd be curious how its features work for a civil survey oriented user, as it seems aimed more at cartographic stuff, but I may well snag it and take a trial. In particular, the ability to take aerial photos and integrate them with ground control data would be excellent.
Religion requires taking things to be true based on faith with no evidence. Naturalism (and science in general) rejects the supernatural precisely because of the lack of evidence showing it as real.
You conflate your view of naturalism as a religious belief with Gould's view that evolution is strongly founded in naturalism. I've read Gould, and he specifically states that evolution, so far as he's concerned, is scientifically correct. There's no "but its a belief, and not supported by evidence". There's no "but only correct if our basic naturalist assumption is correct". The people who insult naturalism as a religious belief are creationists. And of course they wouldn't have any reason to tear down evolution and naturalism, right?
I've read critiques of Gould's views by creationists; they invariably misunderstand his views, misunderstand the scientific method, and more often than not misunderstand things like inductive reasoning. I'm not impressed.
Not in most schools, but there are a few, and more where evolution is denigrated as its taught. And that's just in the curriculum; imagine what a born-again teacher might do outside of the curriculum.
It has data on systemic illness occurrences, the likelihood thereof, genetic damage, carcinogenic, pulmonary, hepatic, all kinds of problems as a result of exposure to plutonium.
We've had 50 years of experiences with plutonium exposure, and contrary to your belief, we've paid attention to at least some of it. Radionuclides, due to the paranoia people regard them with, have received significant safety testing.
Read the article I linked, then come back and tell me we don't know anything.
The problem is that audiophiles are rarely smart enough to understand the research that refutes their bullshit. Then again, I suppose that if they were smart enough to understand it, they'd stop paying thousands of dollars for cables.
Reading that paper brought back fond memories of my acoustics professor, who one day brought in a hand built 50W solid-state amp and a (borrowed) tube amp, hooked it up to a very nice set of monitors, and proceeded to prove to the students that the only differences they could hear were in their heads. Especially when he started bringing out his measurement gear. I think he might have had a subtraction rig setup at one point too; it's been a few years.
There's actually quite a bit of data about the danger of ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise coming into contact with plutonium. I'd start with ATSDR's PDF on plutonium biological effects.
And to start, I'd note that pretty much the entirety is consumed by discussions of the radiological toxic effects of plutonium, because the chemical toxicity is pretty much negligible by comparison.
Before you talk out of your ass and say things like "No one knows the danger of inhaling or contacting plutonium", make an attempt to look for things like MSDS or CDC's ToxFAQs, okay? Otherwise you just look like a tinfoil wearing paranoid crank.
Unless you like looking like what you obviously are, of course.
There's also the fun little thing known as Tsar Bomba">Tsar Bomba. Largest nuke ever tested. 50 Megatons actual, due to some changes made before test - the design was for a 100Mt yield.
For reference, 100Mt would have been roughly enough to cause 3rd degree burns to everyone inside of West Germany. Except for the ones within 60km of ground zero, who would have just been vaporized.
They might be excited at the idea of two isolated environments with a known time of divergence from a common base. It provides a very nice test bed for various observations about evolution, if they really have been seperated for an extended period of time from each other and the outside world both.
Hey, that's awesome! I've studied evolution (science without religious assumptions based on, you know, evidence) myself, but I would have to guess that they do, in fact, have reason to believe they haven't touched for 500,000 years.
Or do you think that it's just a big conspiracy against all you creationists who refuse to acknowledge that your viewpoint is sort of ridiculous?
This one quote in that link sums up my entire rant in about one sentence.
"The 'valve sound' is one phenomenon that may have a real existence; it has been known for a long time that listeners sometimes prefer to have a certain amount of second-harmonic distortion added in, and most valve amplifiers provide just that, due to grave difficulties in providing good linearity with modest feedback factors. While this may well sound nice, hi-fi is supposedly about accuracy, and if the sound is to be thus modified it should be controllable from the front panel by a 'niceness' knob."
I did try ACPI off on Gentoo and I think on Mandrake; with SUSE it paniced and I think my exact words were "Fuck this, I have better things to do with my life, let's go to the bar."
I'll take a shot at it next time I have more time to fuck around with than I have bar money.
I work in two environments, actually. In one of them, I work for a Fortune 50 corporation and have all my tech support done for me. Here I use Windows apps; I could, in theory, switch to a UNIX machine, but its cheaper to run Windows and the group I work for uses some Windows apps - mainly VB to do test interfaces for our hardware. We could probably use something equivalent on Linux, but the advantage to VB is that everyone has a Windows machine to use as a test station. We could switch to Linux, and some people (mainly software engineers) have, but even our big iron engineers, the ones who used to do chip design on big HP workstations, just VNC to big servers to do their chip design these days from their little Dell laptops.
The other environment is moonlighting as the main tech support for a 2 person civil engineering firm. That's the one you're thinking of.
I don't see a particular benefit in switching to Linux, is the thing. Let's say the commercial apps are the same quality. Odds are I would have to pay for a new license, pay time to learn the new app, pay time to learn to properly admin Linux, and deal with the headaches of getting a plotter/tablet/whatever to work properly on Linux. Why would I put myself through all that to get away from an OS that is, frankly, quite functional with a little bit of awareness? Anyone on/. knows that applying patches, running a hardware firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and not running crappy programs will make Windows adequately secure.
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Well, for one thing you design a robot that can tolerate limited error and go around it.
For another, you design a robot that can "phone home" for instructions in the case of the unexpected, just like a human would.
And for the third, developing a robotic repair capability would allow us to maintain things like the JWST if we need to, things that are outside of our current human space presence. How can you possibly view that as bad?
Yes, human space exploration is good, but we know how to send missions to Hubble, we know how to do spacewalks. We don't know how to let a robot automatically do detailed repair and upgrade work. I have a lot of respect for Hubble, but at this point in its lifetime, using it as the testbed for automated robotic repair technologies is every bit as useful as the continued science it can do.
You're a total crackpot.
If a blackhole came near enough to us to affect us, we would be *screwed*, warning or none. We don't have interstellar flight and would be unlikely to develop it in time, and you'd need interstellar flight to avoid that sort of disaster.
No, it really isn't, for two reasons - conformal battery packs and size.
It's one thing to exchange a propane tank, but electric cars use a LOT of batteries, spread all over the vehicle. Exchanging 750 pounds of batteries isn't going to be any faster than charging them.
Further, I would assume that to minimize the location issues, sooner or later they may have to go to conformal cells, which would be even less exchangeable.
Actually, for a car, batteries have a bigger problem - charge time. Who wants to sit around for hours waiting for their car to charge?
Flywheels, OTOH, are interesting. There's a company (US Flywheel) that, last I checked, had a working 50lb flywheel, 6" radius, that spun at 60krpm. This gives an energy storage of KE = 5.2 MJ. A gallon of gas stores 120 MJ. Now, that seems like a lot - after all, you're replacing a gallon of gas weighing around 6 lbs with 1200 lbs of flywheel. However, here are some things to consider - flywheel efficiencies are typically 80-90%, with 95% not unheard of (remember, the flywheel basically provides direct energy to a highly efficient electric motor), while gas engines that approach 30% are considered very good. Thus, a gallon of gas stores 120 MJ, but you only get 40 out, while you still get around 5 MJ for your 50 lb flywheel. Add to this the support structure needed for a gas-based car - engine, transmission, gas tank, etc, and you might find that flywheels could compete. The primary problem right now is that the kind of flywheel I'm talking of is a composite-fiber custom job that ain't cheap; mass production might help bring it down to the point where it could be used in cars.
And the nice thing about flywheels is that you can spin them up a lot faster than you can charge a battery. 3 hours charging is one thing, but I suspect a 10-20 minute charge for 300 miles of driving wouldn't bother anyone.
15 would be a little bit much for me, but in a lot of big cities it really can be faster to cycle if its less than 10 miles. I'm not a speedy cyclist and can usually do about 10 mph on city streets (note: I stop at stop signs and follow rules of the road, the 10 mph is ground covered, not cycle speed). During rush hour, 10 miles can easily be an hour long drive.
Work for me is 32 miles away; cycling the whole thing isn't an option, but I do try to do part of my trip by cycle (the rest is by train and bus; it takes about 30-50 minutes longer, but I don't have to drive).
I have studied the origin of religious thought, and its application to morality, as present in the Judaeo-Christian faiths.
Give me one piece of fact supporting religion. One piece of what the scientific method would consider verifiable evidence for it.
The things in science that I take on faith are taken, not on faith in the actual discovery, but on faith in the scientists and methods used to determine and verify the discovery. My faith is that, if I looked at their data, I would see the same thing.
There are thoughtful Christians, but rarely are they truly thoughtful about their faith. Unfortunately, there's something about religion that blinds even the most intelligent, rational person.
That's interesting-looking; I'd be curious how its features work for a civil survey oriented user, as it seems aimed more at cartographic stuff, but I may well snag it and take a trial. In particular, the ability to take aerial photos and integrate them with ground control data would be excellent.
Thanks for the link.
Religion requires taking things to be true based on faith with no evidence. Naturalism (and science in general) rejects the supernatural precisely because of the lack of evidence showing it as real.
You conflate your view of naturalism as a religious belief with Gould's view that evolution is strongly founded in naturalism. I've read Gould, and he specifically states that evolution, so far as he's concerned, is scientifically correct. There's no "but its a belief, and not supported by evidence". There's no "but only correct if our basic naturalist assumption is correct". The people who insult naturalism as a religious belief are creationists. And of course they wouldn't have any reason to tear down evolution and naturalism, right?
I've read critiques of Gould's views by creationists; they invariably misunderstand his views, misunderstand the scientific method, and more often than not misunderstand things like inductive reasoning. I'm not impressed.
Not in most schools, but there are a few, and more where evolution is denigrated as its taught. And that's just in the curriculum; imagine what a born-again teacher might do outside of the curriculum.
Did you even read the linked pdf?
It has data on systemic illness occurrences, the likelihood thereof, genetic damage, carcinogenic, pulmonary, hepatic, all kinds of problems as a result of exposure to plutonium.
We've had 50 years of experiences with plutonium exposure, and contrary to your belief, we've paid attention to at least some of it. Radionuclides, due to the paranoia people regard them with, have received significant safety testing.
Read the article I linked, then come back and tell me we don't know anything.
You mean audio that makes your insides want to become your outsides?
:)
I can give you that.
The problem is that audiophiles are rarely smart enough to understand the research that refutes their bullshit. Then again, I suppose that if they were smart enough to understand it, they'd stop paying thousands of dollars for cables.
Reading that paper brought back fond memories of my acoustics professor, who one day brought in a hand built 50W solid-state amp and a (borrowed) tube amp, hooked it up to a very nice set of monitors, and proceeded to prove to the students that the only differences they could hear were in their heads. Especially when he started bringing out his measurement gear. I think he might have had a subtraction rig setup at one point too; it's been a few years.
Funny.
There's actually quite a bit of data about the danger of ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise coming into contact with plutonium. I'd start with ATSDR's PDF on plutonium biological effects.
And to start, I'd note that pretty much the entirety is consumed by discussions of the radiological toxic effects of plutonium, because the chemical toxicity is pretty much negligible by comparison.
Before you talk out of your ass and say things like "No one knows the danger of inhaling or contacting plutonium", make an attempt to look for things like MSDS or CDC's ToxFAQs, okay? Otherwise you just look like a tinfoil wearing paranoid crank.
Unless you like looking like what you obviously are, of course.
There's also the fun little thing known as Tsar Bomba">Tsar Bomba. Largest nuke ever tested. 50 Megatons actual, due to some changes made before test - the design was for a 100Mt yield.
For reference, 100Mt would have been roughly enough to cause 3rd degree burns to everyone inside of West Germany. Except for the ones within 60km of ground zero, who would have just been vaporized.
For someone willing to call out a post like that and a poster like kfg as "ignorant", you're a fucking coward, aren't you?
I sign my name when I say something.
Are you saying like attracts like? ;)
Eh, we screw you guys with all our pollution. If it makes you feel any better, last I lived in Michigan Toronto was shipping us their trash.
Blasphemer. Everyone knows you eat salamanders with mustard and cayenne pepper.
They might be excited at the idea of two isolated environments with a known time of divergence from a common base. It provides a very nice test bed for various observations about evolution, if they really have been seperated for an extended period of time from each other and the outside world both.
Hey, that's awesome! I've studied evolution (science without religious assumptions based on, you know, evidence) myself, but I would have to guess that they do, in fact, have reason to believe they haven't touched for 500,000 years.
Or do you think that it's just a big conspiracy against all you creationists who refuse to acknowledge that your viewpoint is sort of ridiculous?
That is a very, very nice link, by the way.
I did try ACPI off on Gentoo and I think on Mandrake; with SUSE it paniced and I think my exact words were "Fuck this, I have better things to do with my life, let's go to the bar."
I'll take a shot at it next time I have more time to fuck around with than I have bar money.
I work in two environments, actually. In one of them, I work for a Fortune 50 corporation and have all my tech support done for me. Here I use Windows apps; I could, in theory, switch to a UNIX machine, but its cheaper to run Windows and the group I work for uses some Windows apps - mainly VB to do test interfaces for our hardware. We could probably use something equivalent on Linux, but the advantage to VB is that everyone has a Windows machine to use as a test station. We could switch to Linux, and some people (mainly software engineers) have, but even our big iron engineers, the ones who used to do chip design on big HP workstations, just VNC to big servers to do their chip design these days from their little Dell laptops.
The other environment is moonlighting as the main tech support for a 2 person civil engineering firm. That's the one you're thinking of.
COordinate GeOmetry. I have no idea why it's COGO and not COGE.
However, they're useful. The person who surveyed your house probably used one, for one thing.
I don't see a particular benefit in switching to Linux, is the thing. Let's say the commercial apps are the same quality. Odds are I would have to pay for a new license, pay time to learn the new app, pay time to learn to properly admin Linux, and deal with the headaches of getting a plotter/tablet/whatever to work properly on Linux. Why would I put myself through all that to get away from an OS that is, frankly, quite functional with a little bit of awareness? Anyone on /. knows that applying patches, running a hardware firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and not running crappy programs will make Windows adequately secure.
What product would that be?
(I think you forgot a link there, buddy.)